Poverty and the sexual marketplace

One of the great religious puzzles of our time is that millions of people vote Republican on what they take to be Christian principles, in defiance of their economic interests. This week's New Yorker carries an excellent piece by George Packer about working class voters in Ohio which makes their economic misery very vivid. But it also casts light in passing on one reason why some might vote for the Republicans who are responsible for much of their misery. At the beginning, Packer meets Carrie Snodgrass, who works two jobs, as a receptionist and cleaner, which keep her out of the house from six in the morning to ten at night. She owns her own house, and doesn't otherwise have extravagant debts. She looks after her sister's two teenage daughters. She has no job security, no expectations for her old age, and no hope of decent health insurance.

The standard leftwing response is to see this as a result of rightwing policies and obviously to a very large extent it is. Her life would be very much better if she had health insurance, a decent minimum wage, job security, properly funded schools for her girls, or even a functioning public transport system, so that she didn't have to commute by car between her two jobs.

But there is also a socially conservative twist to her story, which does something to explain the fact so puzzling to the rest of the world, that there are millions of poor Americans who are not going to vote for Obama.

"These days, you have to struggle," she said. "As a kid, I used to be able to go to the movies or to the zoo. Now you can't take your children to the zoo or go to the movies, because you've got to think how you're going to put food on the table." Snodgrass's parents had raised four children on two modest incomes, without the ceaseless stress that she was enduring. But the two-parent family was now available only to the "very privileged." She said that she had 10 good friends; eight of them were childless or, like her, unmarried with kids. "That's who's middle-class now," she said. "Two parents, two kids? That's over. People looked out for me. These kids nowadays don't have nobody to look out for them. You're one week away from (a) losing your job, or (b) not having a paycheck."

She takes for granted that marriage, or having a lasting, dependable partner, is one of the good things which the system takes away from the poor, and I think she's right. It is very much harder to be a single parent than part of a parenting couple and the poorer you are the harder it gets.

I think that the evangelicals who bang on about the sanctity of marriage have grasped this, in a confused and often nasty way (after all, it's not gay people who cause problems for women). We all know now that a society in which marriage is compulsory leads to great miseries for women. But so does one in which marriage is entirely optional and no one ever leaves the sexual marketplace. In such a society everyone may at any moment be traded in for a more attractive model, or one offering better terms, so that Carrie Snodgrass could add that you're only ever a week away from single parenthood as well as from unemployment.

And that explains one of the huge practical benefits that religious membership offers the poor. Of course religion can be patriarchal, oppressive, and profoundly misogynistic. But it doesn't have to be. It can be way for women to help each other and to feel more secure about not being dumped. This paradox explains, I think, why American evangelical Christians have been able to maintain such a strong view of the sanctity of marriage, even though they are just as likely to divorce as unbelievers. That looks like hypocrisy, but that can't be all it is. It is also the position of bankrupts who hold a high view of solvency.